Budget travel

I’ve had great fun playing with Google Map’s Street View.

On a Google map, there is an icon of a little green man on the top left corner (yellow circle):

When you drag the man onto a street, the view changes to the street level. There, you can use the direction keys to “walk” around. You can also look around by moving your mouse as if it’s your head. Here I’m approaching the Flat Iron Building in NYC:

From Google’s website:

Google collects these images using special cameras and equipment that capture and match images to a specific location using GPS devices. Once the images are captured, they are “sewn” together to create a 360° panorama. Faces and license plates are blurred before the panorama images are served and become viewable in Google Maps…

Street View imagery is limited to public streets. Ultimately we’d love to drive every public road available, but there is no guarantee that we can cover every location completely…

In other words, it’s not available for places with no vehicular access. How disappointing; I was hoping to see the peak of Mt. Everest.

Within minutes, I found myself revisiting some of the memorable places I’ve been to, such as this cozy Sushi shop in Tokyo where Dad managed to buy takeaway despite knowing no Japanese (he’s got a gift in sign language):

The pier where I boarded the lake cruise in Luzern, Switzerland – also where I caught my first view of a snow mountain:

Vino Vino in Taipei – good coffee and pasta at ridiculously low prices:

Streets around Galerie La Fayette, Paris – I tried to find the boulangerie where I bought the pie that almost cracked my teeth or choked me to death. I’ll elaborate in the next post.